The present invention relates to the field of communication networks and more precisely of data packet processing in packet routers.
Data packet routers are located in the network nodes. In the case of flow aware packet networks, said routers and particularly the ones corresponding to nodes located at the edges of the network have to keep a memory of the state information of the flows entering the system. Such recording has to be achieved for all the flows received by the network nodes. In the case of high speed channels (≧10 Gb/s), said flow state information associated with flow IDs needs to be available as fast as possible to prevent delays during packet processing.Besides, the flow size may vary from a “mouse” flow comprising a few (a dozen for example) packets to “elephant” flows comprising hundreds of packets. The memory capacity needs therefore to be large enough to cover any situation.Thus, flow-information storage needs to combine large capacity memory with reduced latency access of the stored data such that transmitted packets can be processed according to the data bitrate of the transmission. Moreover, the cost of such memory has to remain as low as possible to be widely used.